“Then I know how to act.”
They were in a Chinese boudoir full of figures frightful enough to give nightmares. On its painted walls, amid sporting butterflies, were gilt dwarfs and monsters, meditative storks, platforms with impossible stairs, trees that looked like hands, and faces that looked like wafers. The human figures did not stand on their ill-shaped feet; the trees had no roots; the houses were as much in the air as the birds. There was no solid ground; everything was suspended ’twixt earth and heaven on a background of shining black, like a sky of ink. The vacuous Chinese faces, looking on with stolid impartiality, seemed to be making their own reflections on the living scene, and the gold and silver butterflies amused the fancy with a sort of reflection on those dream-like walls, of the Marquis de Telleria’s ambiguous smile. Chocolate-coloured bronzes stood in every corner and on every table; and those solemn idols—melancholy, hideous, dropsied and gloomy—might have been the embodiment of Don Agustin de Sudre’s grievances and woes.
It was like turning over a leaf in a picture book to go from this Chinese apartment into the billiard-room, an Arab divan, where Leopoldo with a tube for inhaling tar between his teeth, as if it were a cigar, was amusing himself with practising the game.
A footman came into the room.
“Did you ring, Sir?”
“Yes,” said the young man without looking up, “bring me some beer.”
The servant was leaving the room when Polito called after him to ask if breakfast would soon be ready.
“In a few minutes, Sir.”
And he went on playing with the balls.
The master of the house had left the Chinese boudoir to his visitors, and a pompous, red-faced maître d’hotel, picked up in some Paris café, who might have passed for an English lord but for his smooth servility and obsequious nervousness, waited on the lady to take her orders.